


halcyon

by brigantines



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Character Study, Don't copy to another site, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26689474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigantines/pseuds/brigantines
Summary: Your mother was a mortal woman.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 64





	halcyon

**Author's Note:**

> i can't fucking believe i sat down and wrote something in one weekend holy shit
> 
> anyway this does not actually contain any spoilers for the end of the game, as I wrote it while watching an LP of the early access version that cuts you off at a certain part. i will probably keep adding and editing as i get further along. ships are uhhhh various, problematic, and also background. zag loves his dog and his bed and his sword. and his mom.
> 
> UPDATE 9/29/20 oops i totally rewrote the whole thing

***

Your mother was a mortal woman.

The knowledge burns, not unpleasantly, like a hot little coal between the lungs. It’s more of a spur than any torture that could be conjured down here. You know torture. You know the strange idiosyncrasies of shades, and the strange things they find painful. Not to their bodies, which after all are not exactly flesh, anymore, but to their minds. 

The things they obsess about. The phrases they repeat.

You are ashamed, just a little, that you are now just like them: rolling that painful kernel of knowledge around between your teeth, gnawing on it endlessly. 

But then, you are part mortal yourself, aren’t you.

There have been great heroes with such dual heritage. There have been songs and stories, the kind you listened to with rapt wonder as a boy. But those heroes, you have always thought, honored and respected the revelation of their lineage as a wondrous thing. They started off believing themselves to be mortal, or at least living the trappings of a mortal life, and became elevated. 

You are the opposite. Have there been tales and heroes about one like you, who finds the godly half objectionable, and the mortal half golden and tempting with the shine of unknown promise?

Perhaps if you were the son of a different god. 

What you know about mortals is all gleaned from the shades of the dead, from scraps of gossip and legends and the things you’ve heard others say about the sunlit world, when they have traveled there. You have never been. You have never been allowed.

You hear that mortals are weak and unprepared for the struggles they face. You hear that the sunlit world can be merciless, although what that means in comparison to the unmerciful Underworld, you do not know. Is it worse? Is it better? The Underworld is full of the dead, after all. Can’t even kill your way out of problems; they’ll just come back.

Of course, sometimes that’s not a bad thing. You’ll come back too, if you’re someone else’s problem. 

Everything in the sunlit world struggles just to live, you have heard. The people fight and toil all their days to stay alive, to stay healthy, to make some small mark on the world. They must feed themselves, and clothe themselves, and live in shelters that they build or pay for others to build. Even the most privileged, the royalty and the great warriors and the richest of them will someday become old, and injured, and sick. They must snatch happiness as they can.

But they are allowed happiness, to offset their woes. The gods are capricious but more often take no notice of what a single mortal does or doesn’t do. Their unimportance protects them, somewhat. Certainly their world does not shift around them daily as part of a dismal labyrinth, and their lands are not filled with monsters that exist only to pen them in.

You have no idea what that is like.

Everything they earn through the hard years of their lives must be taken, stolen, brute-forced from someone or something else. If you do not take, you will be taken from. That, you understand very well. 

The snow-filled woods are silent, save for the merry sound of flowing water. This is, you have been informed by the various confused shades you canvassed, back in the House, a ‘babbling brook.’ You put your hand into it once out of curiosity and wonder and had to bite back an exclamation: it was cold, frigid cold, enough to turn even your skin numb in seconds. You are used to the unchanging chill of the House and of Tartarus, which did not seek to steal your heat the way this moving air and water does. You exhale heat with every breath, and you do not get it back. Your internal furnace runs very hot, fortunately.

Your blood may be mortal-colored, as your father likes to remind you, but it is hot enough to burn. When it splatters against the rocks of Tartarus and Asphodel, it scorches and smokes. In Elysium, the grass bears the scars of your passing. 

Walking in the water is not a great idea. It sizzles and steams around your feet in great billowing plumes, and for the first time you feel the sensation of real cold against your soles, as if it might get inside. There is enough water just laying around in the sunlit world, perhaps, to put the fires inside of you out for good, and you vow to tread more carefully around Lord Poiseidon in the future.

A sudden stinging forces your gaze down; your hand is blistered again, a white and ugly welt rising against the skin. Swinging an axe, apparently, is different from all your weaponswork. And you would have said that your hands were those of a warrior. Tough and experienced, like Achilles when he had lived.

(You are not like Achilles when he lived. You asked him about his mother, and about the sea she came from. He spoke of his duty to go to war-- the same story, over and over. Shades, chewing on their regrets.)

Anyway. How difficult could it be to chop some wood? You had an axe, the proper tool for chopping wood. Or so you’ve heard. You had… well, certainly you’d had a lot more strength and vigor before your doting father decided to beat the ever-loving shit out of you for defying his stupid commands, but you still have _some_ energy left. You’ll be falling face first into the damned river soon enough, but you have a little time. A little strength. Are you not a god?

Your mother was a mortal woman, so maybe you’re not, actually. And it turns out it’s really fucking difficult to do anything when you’re dying. 

It’s laughable, really; the mighty Prince of Hades, capable of vanquishing demons and specters with ease, stalled by the simple act of cutting down a tree. Not even a particularly large tree. You picked it because it didn’t seem like a particularly large tree. 

They will not write songs of your labors, you think, but they bloody well ought to. Attempting to chop down a tree while dying of battle wounds ought to be deserving of a tune. Orpheus could compose one for you, and then refuse to perform it.

You’re leaving a lot of red in the snow, again. 

It’s unfair. All of this is unfair. You met all the conditions. You fought and bargained and you ran through fire. You were victorious, in the end, but the injuries of your long journey will be catching up to you. Forcing you back to the beginning. Undoing everything. 

He told you, spitefully, that you will never get out of these woods. 

Perhaps you have an hour. Perhaps less than that. One would think you’d have a much better idea, after all this time, of what limits your body can be pushed to. Where the line is.

You raise the axe again, grimly. Your muscles ache and protest. Your breath steams. The snow continues to fall in peaceful, fluffy flakes, piling over your footsteps, obscuring any evidence of your presence. Erasing you. 

Sisyphus has said, not quite joking, that you are taking him on as a role model. He has said, not quite joking, that he’s extremely flattered, but can’t really recommend it as a lifestyle. Is this truly what you wish, Prince?

You aren’t taking him on as a role model. Sisyphus was a clever and crafty king in life. A killer of men, also, but who wasn’t, in the sunlit world.

No one has ever accused you of being clever. You’re just a guy with a sword, too stubborn to give up. 

Chopping down a tree is necessary, because you are building a cabin. Well. Rebuilding. There was once a cabin here before, but it has since half-collapsed. There is no other shelter to be found amidst the broken stone ruins, and you refuse to huddle on the doorstep while you finish dying. You would like a chair. A roof. A small place of comfort.

It’s your time, after all. You can do with it as you wish, before the haze sets in and you’re forced to start over from the beginning. One of these days, you will win the battle against your father _without_ such grievous injuries, and on the day you will continue onwards through the woods. Perhaps by then you’ll have a neat little shack with a chair and a table and a fireplace, all laid in and waiting for you. You can rest your tired feet on the dry wood and set it ablaze. 

It would be much easier to order a pack of shades to do all this manual labor. You’ve some experience, sort of. Your renovation decisions are _tasteful_ and _practical,_ thank you. Although a shade of an ordinary person would probably know how it’s meant to be done. But there are no shades here. Just you, and the axe, and the woods. And your growing weakness.

Your mother was a mortal woman, you remind yourself. Perhaps this is how she made her escape. Perhaps she came from that same door, perhaps Cerberus had let her through. Perhaps she walked through these woods and passed by the same little ponds, perhaps she walked between the same broken columns. 

Perhaps you have followed in her footsteps. When you first saw the little snow-covered hut tucked away amidst the tall trees, your heart leapt, but then you saw it was ramshackle and abandoned, the wind and snow blowing through the cracks. The door hung askew, and there were holes in the mass of sticks and moss and dead plant matter that made up the roof. There was no particular trace of any owner. 

If your mother passed this way, there was no trace. It must have been many years ago, after all. Long enough for you to grow up without her, long enough for her memory to have been forgotten-- or deliberately buried-- in the House. But still you think of her hand resting on the wood as she peered inside the rickety little building, looking into the shadows. Perhaps she ducked inside to take shelter. Perhaps she walked around the little clearing, gathering sticks, and brought them in to light a fire in the hearth against the cold. 

A rough hewn bed frame remained in the corner, built of sturdy wood, though the slats or strings that would’ve supported any mattress had long since rotted away. You pictured her sitting on its edge, resting for a moment. You imagined every place her hand might have touched, so that you can press your palm to it, foolishly.

You should have stolen the letter. You should have had the words, the fine handwriting, etched upon your skin so you could look at it whenever you wished. You would rival Narcissus, staring at yourself in reflection. 

Perhaps the little hut had belonged once to a woodcutter, or some far-ranging hunter who sought solitude like Artemis. There was an old and rust-splotched axe thrust into a tree stump outside the door. There was no garden, or at least you cannot see anything, buried beneath the snow. On another day, perhaps you’ll dig the snow up and properly look. Not today. Today, you must chop down a tree and then die. Hopefully in that order. 

Achilles had looked startled when you asked him about cabin-building. Shack building? You’re not sure of the architectural differences between a cabin and a shack, or a shack and a hut. Must it be round to be called a hut?

Achilles could not enlighten you. Great and storied heroes, you suppose, did not often find themselves doing such work in their lifetimes. Ordinary mortal work. Achilles’s expertise was all about fighting and weaponry, which was why he’d been set to guarding your father’s private rooms. From you, specifically. Probably.

Once, you believed that it was some kind of honor, for him to have been plucked from Elysium to serve in the House, serve the Prince. Now you think it was far more likely your father tossed him to you, or you to him, to occupy your time like giving an irritating puppy something to gnaw on. What does Hades care that you can swing a sword? He could’ve told any shade to train you. 

He could’ve told any shade to refuse you, if you should ever ask. 

“I was too proud in my youth to learn such practical things,” Achilles says, his smile soft and self-deprecating. That sort of smile used to make you fumble your drills when you were younger. You humiliated yourself for him. More than once. 

Well. You were a desperate boy, then. You might still be a desperate boy, but you’ve since learned the right way to ask is not to ask. Asking invites refusal. Achilles does not disobey orders from the son of his master. He does everything you command-- and nothing more. Nothing of his own volition.

Sometimes you’d rather the sting of Megaera’s whip, which is at least honest. You can’t pity-whip someone. You hope you can’t pity-whip someone. Meg has told you over and over that corporal punishment is an _art form, Zagreus, and you wouldn’t understand,_ so you just have to trust her expertise on the subject. She’s very pitiless. You love that about her, truly, even when it makes your life much more difficult. 

One day, she’s going to get you back for every defeat you’ve put her through. One day, when this is all over, she’s going to crush you beneath her exquisitely spiked heel. She might leave a real scar. 

You didn’t ask her how to build a cabin. She’s angry enough at you already, even though it’s Hades who is making this the problem it doesn’t need to be. There’s nothing she can do about him. You are a much more convenient target.

You should’ve asked the contractor. Although in the House of Hades, they don’t build with wood when stone and iron and ugliness would do instead. 

Of course your mother hated it there. Of course she did. The cold, creeping damp. The crumbling architecture, the blind grasping hands sprouting everywhere like weeds, the fires, the ceaseless wailing in the distance, the resentful muttering of ghosts. Even the so-called fields of paradise are not lovely to your eyes, with their sickly green and blue phosphorescence and the great gaping holes of cold fog to remind everyone what lies below. And the unfriendly residents, all firmly and unattractively quashed beneath Hades’ thumb. ‘Here is your eternal rest and reward, but no, actually, I have decided that you must fight to the death some stranger, who has nothing to do with you, and also you must fight as many times as I say.’

Also, the statues are ugly, and the torches burn cold, and the teeming shades of the arena favor a crowing idiot. You have found nothing in Elysium to be either beautiful or restful. If you were in charge, you would make it much nicer. The fishing would be better.

In any case you are spitefully certain that your father kept her in the House, far below Elysium’s dubious pleasures. There is certainly nothing to love about the House, unless one enjoyed skeleton-themed decor and the dripping, smelly wax from hundreds of candles. And scrolls. Libraries upon libraries of old, moldering scrolls, that would only continue to molder and never quite actually decay into dust. 

Perhaps that is what bothers you most. The House has been like this since you were old enough to know it, and it will continue like this long after you are gone, you’re sure. The carpets in the hallways will always be the same, and the tapestries upon the stone walls. No one will think to change them if you are not around to suggest it. The bloody gurgling river will continue to pour stickily into the pool, and persons-- well, former persons-- will continue to walk up the steps, squelching, leaving congealing red footprints to dry and fade, to be greeted indifferently or offensively by Hypnos with his ever present list. The jokes will not get any better. The Lord Hades will be sour and brusque. 

The House is constant. The work is constant. The interactions are constant; different words, perhaps, but the same conversations and transactions. Every day the joyless levels of the realm of death will continue to be full of grim, dour figures going on about their grim, dour business, eternal and unchanging. They will not change. 

Nothing will change. 

You think, this is how she felt. This must be what drove her out. This sense of restlessness, of unrightness. This is your kingdom and your birthright, or so you used to believe, but there has always been… something. Looking out over the drunken leaning buildings of Tartarus didn’t inspire pride or awe or a sense of responsibility. You looked out upon your world and thought, is that it?

Now it makes sense. You were never a prince, but a prisoner. Like she was. A living being stuck in this pit of shades and shadows and regrets. The gods of Olympus are certainly willing to believe that no one wants to spend all eternity down here when there’s some alternative. 

There is something wrong with you. Your half-siblings (non-siblings? Pseudo-siblings? Ex-siblings?) were born to their jobs, their talents and interests put to use, but you were not born to anything at all. There is no job for you, aside from being the heir, which is ridiculous as your father will never retire from the work, and even if he did he would not hand it off to you. He would find someone else. He would find literally anyone else before allowing you. You know this because he’s said so.

You have been told you are not suited to anything. Training with Achilles is not a job. Cataloging the many varieties of hellfish is not a job. Running menial errands and being your father’s crony/secretary is not even a job, as any shade could do it. A shade _is_ doing it while you are otherwise occupied. 

The things you do are only to occupy your idle hands. You exist only to spend time, apparently. And to be a bad influence on others, or so your father grumbles after you finally successfully cajole Thanatos and his enormous, tiresome attitude about responsibility into your bed to be divested of it. Why not? What else is there to do, but spend your time? 

Thanatos says, in that pointed and pained tone of voice: I have my duties, Zagreus. He implies you keep him from them.

You say back, because he expects it: isn’t there more to life than just duty? This is brotherly bonding. All in good fun. 

This conforms to his expectations, so that he can say, primly: you will have to tell me, as you have too much of the first and not enough of the latter.

Is there such a thing as too much life? Maybe down here. Maybe he’s right. Maybe you do only love the dog and your bed and your sword because they can’t demand anything of you.

All the more reason to leave. Megaera can take over for Hades, and Than can take over for you. She can make the cutting comments and dole out the unfair punishments and he’ll make a responsible Prince, which is not even a real job so he won’t have more duties to add. He’ll still be the dependable one. The timely and competent one. 

He thinks you’re irresponsible. He probably thinks that you’re a bad son. He thinks you don’t know that Lord Ares has been patiently and not so patiently waiting for him to stop playing coy. Dutiful Thanatos, who can only enjoy something he’s been dragged into, as if he would never have had the idea on his own, as if it’s an imposition to be pleased or pleasured. 

He thinks you have suddenly changed. Gods and godlings don’t care for change. 

If you do have any talent, it is physical. Achilles says so. Even Meg says so, when she’s feeling generous. But becoming a renowned warrior is not something needed in the Underworld. There is already an endless wellspring of tried and true deceased heroes as well as gazillions of monsters, ready-made for any sort of situation. A mortal sneaking in, needs to be taught a lesson? Someone sneaking out, needs to be caught and dragged back? There are already a hundred willing hands. Yours are not necessary.

There is no need for a Prince of Hades. There wasn’t before you; there will not be after you. What are you here for? Just to be the standard everyone else must leap over, to be thought adequate? 'At least you are not like the Prince. At least Lord Hades favors you more than he favors the Prince.' 

Thanatos doesn’t understand. He thinks your escapes are some insult to him, personally, although he won’t come out and say it. Some flaw you find in the company. He, of course, can go up to the sunlit world any time he wishes, but he does not wish to. He complains of it. He complains of it to _you._

He says, I begin to think I do not know you at all, and you must bite your tongue hard enough to draw blood.

There is no mentioning the fact that his mother, his entire family, is right there, in reach if he should need them. His twin, his quite frankly feral foster siblings, even the worthless old man. If Hades has some poor opinion of Thanatos, he doesn’t air it in front of the entire audience hall, the way he does with you. 

Or perhaps Thanatos simply wasn’t born with something missing. 

You did not tell him you were leaving, or planning to leave. Being the dutiful son, he probably would’ve tried to stop you, or talk you out of it. You would’ve had to tell him that Nyx was supporting you in secret, that you were trying to curry favor with the Olympians. What was he going to do about it? Go with you? He wouldn’t. And if you don’t ask him, you don’t have to hear his answer.

Thanatos doesn’t really believe there’s a way out, after all. Not without Hades’ permission, in some form. He wouldn’t believe that you could follow your mother’s path, the path of a mortal woman, who escaped the bowels of hell all on her own. 

He might say the letter was a lie, or at least that it wasn’t proof that one could make their way out of the Underworld. 

He might say, don’t go.

But probably not. That doesn’t sound like him. And if he did say something like that, you would have to make an answer. You would have to weigh him against that thing that gnaws in your guts, telling you to leave. You have to go. You have to go.

She waits for you, up there.

Better to do it cleanly, like the slice of a blade. At least, that was the plan. Things aren’t so clean, now, after dozens upon dozens of failed escape attempts. He’s angry you didn’t say that you were leaving, he would’ve been angry to be told… there’s no pleasing him now. He’s just going to be angry. 

He will not go with you and so, like the fond memories of a childhood that was all a lie anyway, you must leave him behind. 

You told Achilles, because-- well, you’ve told Achilles a lot of things. When you were younger, you thought that meant something. Since then, you’ve learned a number of things about the dead, and what they hold on to. 

The dead obsess. The dead regret. The dead torture themselves with their own memories, their guilt, their view of their own existence as ended. What does Achilles see, when he looks at you? What does Achilles see, when he watches you fight, or when his hands settle on your hips to adjust your stance, or when he smiles in that distant way? What does he see when you display yourself in his bed, your chiton fallen open in welcome and a wine cup dangling from your fingers, and command him to attend you?

You probably don’t want to know the answer. Achilles has been your dear friend and trainer, but he is dead. He cannot go with you. He would not go, even if he could. He must drag his life and his regrets around like a ball and chain. They hold him prisoner more than any power of Hades does. 

There was never any question of telling Megaera. Meg would’ve chained you hand and foot and sat on you, and not in the fun and exciting way. 

You told Cerberus first. You tell Cerberus everything first, before even Nyx. You do love your dog and your bed and your sword best, because you’re a bad son. 

But this is the truth: your father does not want you for an heir, and you do not want him right back. There is no reason to stay and he keeps you here out of spite.

There’s no way to know for certain, but you imagine fancifully that these feelings belong to your mother. This malcontent finally has a name, a reason. You _are_ a bad son, because you are not with her. The separation is a wrong to be righted. Her blood in your veins speaks to you across the vast distance that separates you. You imagine fancifully that your left eye belongs to her. Was she also dark-haired? What else of yours belongs to her? Your smile, your temper, your fits of longing? 

Of course, you think, being the wife of Hades would drive anyone away, all on its own. He could not have loved her. There is no love in him, or nothing that you would identify as love. You have seen how he is with Nyx, who has borne him children and works dutifully, without complaint, and by her own vows always for the welfare of the House. He does not thank her. He does not offer compliments, or kind actions. Perhaps he does not think of her at all when she is not directly in his sight.

He has nothing to offer her, or any of his other children, except to say, ‘I am the authority here, and will always be.’ 

Harsh words and less harsh words. Punishments and less harsh punishments. Treasures, perhaps, the Lord Hades could provide, but what good were they down here in the Underworld? They couldn’t be admired, except by the dead, who by and large did not care about anything except themselves. To be a queen might be tempting, but not a queen of the dead and damned. You can see no delight in the position. Maybe Meg, although you imagine she would rather be the lord and final authority. In another life, perhaps she would’ve been Master of the Dead and you would’ve been her queen-consort, the decorative trophy, shared amongst her dear sisters. In another life, perhaps that would have contented you, to know nothing more. 

Your mother was a mortal woman. Nyx had described her as stately, and kind. She could’ve been a queen, or a peasant girl, or anything else. A huntress, a weaver, a singer, an acolyte. A heroine, a villainess. All of these things. None of these things. You have tentatively pinned and repinned so many mortal traits onto the blank outline of her, trying to see if any of them seem to ring true, even though you understand it is impossible to know. 

How old was she when she came here? How did she tolerate it long enough to bear a son? Did she hate it? Did she decide to leave because you were the final straw, the last outrage? 

Did she think of taking you with her?

The letter speaks of Olympus, so perhaps your mother was not exactly a mortal woman. But the letter also speaks of a small garden by the sea, dearer than the imagined treasure of Olympus. You have not seen either with your own eyes; honestly at this rate you may never. 

The rivers of the Underworld cannot compare, you tell yourself. The boiling lakes of lava, the endless chilling drift of mists. The sea must be beautiful, if your mother wishes to live where she can look at it always. 

It must be the opposite. That is the only way you can imagine these things, limited by your restricted experience of fire, and darkness, and black stone. 

You think of her in a grand castle. A white, beautiful, glittering castle. The opposite of Underworld structures. The rooms are full of windows and sunlight, and beautiful things. It has no need of fires to warm or light the interior. Everything inside it is pleasing, and it pleases your mother to be there. She leans upon the window and looks out over the ocean. The wind, which you only recently experienced yourself, ruffles her hair gently. 

You cannot see her face. Only her back, as she gazes out this window. You imagine her hair as dark as yours, and then golden as a polished coin, and then as white, like the fall of snow. You cannot decide. Does it fall to the floor in shining waves? Is it curled and short? Does she wear red? No. You must think of opposites. A fine cloak of blue, or of green. You like to think of her going barefoot, although you know very well that most mortals do not, down to her garden, which grows in some interior courtyard, well-protected. She walks among rows and rows of flowers, sheltered and surrounded by beautiful white stone. Perhaps there is an exquisite fountain in the center with some ornate statue, and she sits there and listens to the flowing water. 

She is content, in this castle.

It is not always a castle, in your imaginings. Sometimes it is a grand house in a bustling city. Like the House of Hades, but opposite, everything opposite. It is not dark or oppressive, nor full of whispers and complaints and ghoulish green fire. The city streets are even and wide and well-paved, and they always go to the same places. The houses do not crowd each other like packs of shades, leaning in for endlessly recycled gossip.

No. It is full of people, living people, coming and going all around, full of chatter and good cheer. They do not complain like shades. They complain of ordinary, mortal things, things that may yet change. They are happy and sad and angry and they love each other, and there is no dread lord that hangs over all of them like the grim specter of an axe waiting to fall. They are not reminded in every moment that they are dead. Your mother looks out her window and sees an ocean of people, instead, ebbing and flowing, and it is pleasing to her. The wind touches her hair. Her garden is walled and meticulously tended by servants, with climbing vines on the trellises. She walks through it on golden sandalled feet. When she goes out onto the streets, the people part for her, recognizing something of a queen in her face or bearing. 

She is content, in this house. 

But more and more often you imagine a small dwelling, for only one person. A comfortable, cozy little place. You imagine it, defiantly, as cluttered. Perhaps your mother built it for herself with her own hands. She walks along the beach, and watches the waves roll in as the wind touches her hair. The garden is off the side of the house, small and quaint. She dug it herself, planted it herself, maintains it herself. The soles of her feet are iron-tough and the hem of her dress dirty with mud and brambles, and her fingertips are stained with the juices of the vegetables and fruits she has picked. She carries them in her apron. She hums as she walks. She reaches up to a tree and plucks a ripe fruit from a laden bough. 

A place she can be alone. Beholden to nothing and no one. You are starting to appreciate the appeal.

Or perhaps she has gone to Olympus after all. Perhaps after all the years that have passed she changed her mind, and you will find her there, and it will not be a lie that you are telling to all these proud and jealous gods as you entreat their aid to escape your father. 

You will worry about that later. 

Your breath steams hotly in the winter air. The sunlit world is frozen and silent, the barren woods that surround the ruins and the doorway are still. You defeat your father, and still you can go no further. If you are dying, you go back. If you are _not_ dying, there is a horrible hidden threshold in these woods, and you never know where it will be the next time. The wrong step sends you back broken, just as he promised. 

You are not all the way free. You are in the sunlit world, the wind-swept waste you were warned about, and still you are not free. 

The first time you came to this place, the strangeness of it awed you. You were easy prey. The first time you managed to defeat your father, you were allowed to wander through it, panting, bleeding on the snow. You knew you did not have much time. You would have to try again.

The woods are silent. Your blood steams hotly in the winter air. The snow melts beneath your burning feet, and underneath is thin dry grass, dead and brown. The trees have skeletal branches, divested of their foliage for the season. It is more beautiful than any of Elysium’s flower-filled meadows. 

The wind touches your hair. The cold leeches into your skin. You do not have long to stay. You will put a foot wrong, and go over that invisible threshold, or you will simply bleed out on the white snow and wake, again, in the red pool. Perhaps this is as far as you will ever go, unless the gods of Olympus intervene. Hades says you cannot leave this place. 

Of course, Hades has lied to you, your entire life. He said it was impossible to get here in the first place.

On that day you discovered the hut, you plucked the axe from that stump with the last of your strength. You held it firmly as your hands and face and then limbs went numb. An ordinary, mortal item. It felt solid and real. 

And then you died, remembering the weight of it in your hands. 

You go back. And back again. You must try. Sisyphus encourages you. Eurydice encourages you. For these people who did not make it out, you must. You _must._

Your mother is a mortal woman, somewhere out there, and you must reach her. If time runs out and she comes to the Underworld as a shade… neither of you will ever get out. Hades will lock you both in the deepest, darkest pits, probably. Or he’ll send her off to Olympus, just to spite you. 

Because he is cruel, a notion will occur to him. He will smile to himself, horribly, and write up a contract and say to you: boy, I will send her to Olympus, where she can live happily amongst the joyful gods. If you will give up. If you will promise to obey me. 

And you will. What else could you do? He will buy you at last. 

In those snowy woods, with the last remnants of your strength, each time, you have started bringing a stick to the hut. To rebuild it. There is no reason to do so; there is no reason not to. Someday you may come here and defeat Hades and you will not be in the process of bleeding to death, but that isn’t today. Your hands shake as you measure out a length of wood. You have never built anything of your own before. 

When you find your mother, you will build something for her. If she does not have a house, you will build one. If she has a house that needs repairing, you will do that. If she has a house that is small and not to her liking, you will build her one larger, to her exact desires. You will learn to dig a garden, as mortals do, and harvest it through the seasons. You will do this work for her, that you should have done growing up at her apron strings. You will cut wood for her fires, haul water for her, as sons do in the mortal world. You will put down your sword and shield for the axe and the hammer and the shovel. Achilles will be quite horrified, but then, you did not promise him that you would go on to be a great and storied hero. 

You have been a bad son. You can still make up for it. 

Your breath catches in the cold air. Something about it makes you cough wetly, even though you are not so injured this time. The altitude, perhaps. 

You lift the axe again, blisters stinging, but you have put a foot wrong, you have stepped over that threshold that Hades warned you about. You will be taken back. The journey rewinds, you must do it all again. 

You grit your teeth as the pain takes hold, and exhale her name into the freezing air. This is the only prayer you carry in your heart. This is the only devotion you will ever practice.

“Persephone.”


End file.
